House of 1000 Corpses (2003)
Cast: Sid Haig, Karen Black, Sheri Moon, Bill Moseley
Director: Rob Zombie
Synopsis: Rob Zombie's much delayed and controversial gore shocker has its moments
Reviewed by: Omar Khan

Rob Zombie’s highly anticipated gore shocker met with numerous hurdles on its way to reaching screens at all and once or twice it looked as though it wouldn’t see light of day at all. With America barely recovering from the Columbine killings only to be devastated by the terror attack on New York, the atmosphere was hardly ripe for any major studio to be turning out what could only be seen as a bloodbath of deliciously degenerate proportions. The studio originally handling Rob Zombie’s update of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre saw it as something so ghastly that it would taint their reputations causing irreparable damage – the film was dropped like a hot potato and threatened to rot on the shelves until Lion’s Gate snapped it up and released it early in the summer of 2003 much to the delight of dedicated gore-hounds the world over.

The film begins quite brilliantly, setting the tone perfectly for what’s hoped will follow. In the opening scenes, more than a little reminiscent of the classic prelude in From Dusk Till Dawn we are introduced to a ramshackle yet utterly spellbinding Museum of Monsters and Madmen run by the deranged Colonel Spaulding sporting a hideous clown face. Not only is his wonderful establishment a fabulously cheesy and typically dislocated and rickety old Horror Museum cum Carnival but also a flea pit friend chicken dive as well as a convenience store and gas station. Spaulding and his chum are gassing about this and that, well actually about some schmuck who has recently stuck a Planet of the Apes Zeus doll up his rectum!

Their evening’s ghoulish tranquillity is broken by the arrival of two masked armed robbers who bark instructions at Spaulding much to his disgust. He barks back at the robbers with his sublime southern accent with no intention of being robbed of anything but perhaps a piece of congealed chicken. The heist goes bad and the canny Spaulding end up blowing the scum away with gleeful relish and later as he mops the blood away (“Goddamn Muther F--ker got blood all over my best clown suit!”), some snotty city geeks show up asking some very dumb questions. Two couples having car trouble arrive at Spaulding’s museum and being Fangoria reading types, they are immediately taken by the wonderful, old world horror-cheesiness of the carnival-like museum and force their extremely reluctant and long suffering girlfriends to join them for a “Murder Ride” which is one of the highlights of a visit to the Museum.

Spaulding takes them on the hair-raising murder ride where they encounter some of history’s most notorious serial killers such as Ed Gein, Albert Fish, Lizzie Borden and one rather less known local freak by the name of Dr. Satan who was a local psycho who took enormous pleasure in torturing his patients in the most sadistic manner. He was apparently brutalized by the townsfolk who found about his house of horrors and dealt him some savagely brutal local justice. However, legend has it that his body was never discovered to this day and that he might still be alive out there, carrying on his grisly, barbaric human experiments. The murder ride ends with one of the horror buffs almost wetting his pants in sheer excitement especially at the prospect of being in the town of the unbelievably monstrous Dr. Satan. Moments later, having pestered Spaulding into drawing them directions, the group take off to find the place where Dr. Satan was supposedly hanged for his terrible deeds.

Soon, on the dark deserted streets, they spot a stunningly gorgeous blonde who is desperately trying to hitch a ride. Much to the displeasure of the two girlfriends the blonde is picked up and is only too obliging to show them the exact spot where Dr. Satan had butchered his patients. Up until this moment, the film is simply stunning. The opening scene featuring the hugely charismatic Colonel Spaulding tending to his glorious museum of madmen is simply riveting stuff and then his guided tour through the fabulously staged Murder Ride serves to get anticipation to peak levels. However, tragically the moment the setting strays from Spaulding’s scintillating Museum of Madness, the film too loses direction and proceeds to fall totally flat on its face.

The first quarter of an hour hint at a horror masterpiece yet tragically the moment we are introduced to the occupants of the “House of 1000 Corpses” things fall horribly apart and one yearns for the return of the charismatic and hideous Colonel Spaulding to save us from the entire middle part of the movie which attempts to recreate the “charm” of “The Family” from the superlative Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It simply doesn’t work and the film gets horribly bogged down in a quagmire of mindless violence and spectacularly bad taste gore effects. The nastiness is however offset by the constant injection of humour, even if a lot of it is misguided and not at all funny.

It is delightful to see Karen Black back on screen and she won’t disappoint those who appreciated some of her more odd characterizations over the years. This time around she plays a totally demented Psycho cannibal and does so with her customary relish and a distinct twinkle in the eye. However, sadly apart from Ms. Black’s mad turn and Sid Haig’s brilliance as well as the amazing Museum itself there is little else other than the mess and the gore and the mindlessness of the plot that tend to remain in memory. Rob Zombie runs out of storytelling ideas very early on in proceedings and a procession of noise, gore and flashy MTV style camerawork fails to camouflage the fact that there really isn’t too much of a intelligible plot to the movie for the most part and there really isn’t much of a point to it either.

However despite its inability to take any sort of direction after the opening twenty minutes, there are aspects of the movie that remain memorable; notably Sid Haig as the clown faced crazy as well as his ramshackle though superb museum and that amazing Murder Ride. The opening twenty minutes are brilliantly atmospheric, doused with crackling humour and visually exhilarating, especially the Murder Ride…but sadly after that it’s all down hill and that too very rapidly and irrevocably. Rob Zombie’s film will remain one of the most frustrating of recent horror films in that it promised so much but managed to deliver so little. 1000 Corpses is worth watching for the opening twenty mintues, after that it degenerates alarmingly into little more than a bloody mess.